


where nothing green can grow

by jaystrifes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: A quest to win the heart of the most guarded man in the (under)world, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, And save the world above while you're at it, Dirk is the Emotionally Inept God of Death, Jake is a Nature Demigod but doesn't know it, M/M, Magic? Kinda, The Underworld
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-09
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-06-08 14:46:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15245667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaystrifes/pseuds/jaystrifes
Summary: Jake, lost demigod son of Jade, Goddess of the Wild, is abandoned as a baby on the steps of the Death God's temple. 19 years later, he comes face to face with his god in the Underworld, only to find that the so-called Destroyer of Souls is a tired, lonely immortal named Dirk in desperate need of companionship.Famine falls over the land as the nature goddess grows weaker, and the god of death reaps souls at a volume he has only encountered in times of war. Jade blames Dirk for the theft of an artifact with the intent to deprive her of her powers so that he might benefit from the countless dead of starvation.Caught in a divine feud, Jake will have to help reconcile the differences between his estranged mother and Dirk, or die trying.





	where nothing green can grow

**Author's Note:**

> Hi y'all! I've been sitting on what I've written so far for this fic for a while now and I decided it was finally time to post it. I will do my very best to continue working on it faithfully and see it through to the end.
> 
> This was very much inspired by [this art and premise](http://aryll.tumblr.com/post/160747147495/edit-i-added-more-to-this-au-already-christ-hey) by aryll. The fic will of course expand and maybe diverge a little from that original idea, but that's where it all started. Hope you enjoy!

It’s a fine autumn day. You wake to the singing of birds in the trees, a little hankering for an adventure in your heart, and just the right amount of courage to sneak out of the Temple for the day.

Running fills you with a sense of lightness, like you could just take off the ground and fly. The monks don’t have the lungs to catch up to you, though in their defense, most people don’t. You’ve been told by some friendly fellows at the pub that you were born to be an athlete, with your natural stature and strength, but you’ve never had the opportunity to test your skill beyond the occasional discus throw with some locals. You’re lucky if you can hang around in town for a couple of hours before a fellow acolyte is sent to fetch you and dutifully remind you: “Your oath is to the Prince of Heart, Keeper of the Dead, Destroyer of Souls.”

As much of an oath as it can be if it was taken before you had even spoken your first word, at least, but you’ve learned to keep such misgivings to yourself. You owe the monks for taking you in and raising you, if nothing else. Maybe someday you’ll escape and go far away from here, but for today, you’ll only go as far as the southern grove.

The Temple lies in the far northwestern outskirts of near civilization, in the barren field that’s used as a cemetery, and to get to the grove you have to pass through the village. You make a slight detour to Jane’s bakery, where, as soon as you set foot in the low-roofed little shop, the delectable scents of pastries waft warmly over you. Jane runs the establishment with her father, but she’s the only one working today, and has her back to you, kneading dough into shape on her smooth stone slab table.

You tap her on the shoulder with a big grin and a “Hullo,” and she jumps about five inches off the ground.

“Jake!” she scolds, smacking at your shoulder with her rolling pin. “You know better than to sneak up on me like that!”

You give a guilty but guileless shrug, and Jane folds her arms over her chest with a huff. They’re covered in flour up to her elbows, and it’s dusted all over her apron and even in her hair too. “You look like a garden gnome after winter’s first snow,” you remark, earning yourself another thwack from the rolling pin.

“I’m gno gnome.” She sounds indignant, but you catch the lilt to her phrasing that means there’s a joke hidden in there somewhere.

“Okay, well, maybe a dwarf at best —”

“Oh, hush with the short jokes and come here already.”

Laughing, you wrap her up in a hug. She’s a full head and a half shorter than you, and you have to milk every chance to tease her about it, because what’s a friendship without good old-fashioned ribbing built in? The disparity in height makes her good for picking up and spinning around, which you do with equal glee. Jane giggles uncontrollably even as she demands that you put her down.

Finally, you do, because you don’t want to keep her from her work any longer. You know she has to make a living somehow. Bearing that in mind, those apple pies over there on the rack look and smell irresistible, and you happen to have a few silver pieces you snagged from an elder monk’s coin purse.

Jane knows what you want before you can even turn your pocket inside out to find the money. “Don’t even think about it,” she says, and reluctantly you leave the coins where they are, knowing she won’t take any argument. “You’re my best friend, silly. It’s on the house.”

The slice she sets before you nearly drips with juice from the filling, and she drizzled it with honey, just the way you like it. You hold the belief that there’s no food honey can’t improve, but even without it Jane’s baking would meet a standard beyond perfection. Your mouth waters so much while you wait for her to hand you an eating utensil that you consider using nothing but your face.

Jane watches you with twinkling eyes as you spear a piece on the fork she offered you and eagerly bite into it. You make an absolutely indecent noise at the burst of flavor on your tongue, the perfect tartness of the apple mixed with the sweetness of the honey, and the way the crust crumbles so smoothly that you practically don’t have to chew at all.

“Janey,” you declare, “you are an absolute godsend. I think you used to be their private baker until they took pity on us mortals and decided to share you with the world so that we could all know the taste of your pastries.”

She wrinkles her nose. “I think that if any of your senior monks were here, they’d call that blasphemy.”

You blow a raspberry and wave your hand dismissively at that. “Nuts to whatever those old codgers have to say. I think the gods would agree with me! This pie is nothing short of divine.”

Jane shakes her head at you, but the amused squint at the corners of her eyes gives her away. While you lean against the counter and enjoy your pie, she turns back to her table and keeps rolling out the dough.

“Even if you are a blasphemer, it’s good to see you,” she says playfully over her shoulder. “You haven’t been around very much lately.”

“Haven’t had much chance,” you mumble through a mouthful. “Been itching to get out and about, but they’ve had me cooped up in the Temple for weeks. Some new nonsense about purifying myself for a ritual and whatnot.”

Jane gives you a sympathetic look. “I’d wager you’re not technically supposed to be ‘out and about’ right now either, then.”

“Ha, yeah,” you admit, a little bit sheepishly. Jane doesn’t comment further, apparently absorbed in her work, and you do your best not to distract her.

You do feel bad for sneaking away, but you really needed a break from all the religious fanaticism that plagues the Temple, the animal sacrifices and the ominous chanting prayers. Thinking about it almost makes you lose your appetite for the last bit of your slice of pie, but you eat it anyways, which just goes to show that the power of Jane’s baking can triumph over just about anything.

As good as the food and the company are, you remember you do have other places to be, and lingering too long here is risky.

“I’m heading out,” you announce, setting your fork down on your plate. “I don’t want them to find me here and cause you any trouble over it.”

Jane pauses in shaping her cookies and dusts some of the flour off her hands. “Well, if they come looking, I never saw you,” she says in a completely innocent tone, balanced out by her conspiratorial wink.

You laugh and embrace her again. This time she gets you back by picking _you_ up, holding you aloft by your waist with your hands pinned at your sides. You’re impressed, not for the first time, by her strength. She only puts you down after a fair amount of squirming and cajoling on your part, and with a final quick hug you’re on your way, leaving her to her business.

The main huts of the village are still in sight when you reach the edge of the southern grove, but the Temple isn’t. The plain, ordinary buildings are all distant enough that they seem quaint, painted picture-perfect onto the landscape, complete with wisps of smoke curling from chimneys and swaying fields of crops nearly ripe for the fall harvest. It’s all nice from a distance, maybe because you’re used to seeing it from that angle, but it doesn’t call to you the way the woods do.

A breeze sighs through the leaves as you step beneath their canopy, like a welcome home. They’re starting to turn to their brilliant autumn hues, sun-warm oranges and speckled banana yellows and bursting sunset reds. Though they haven’t yet started falling en masse, a patchwork coat of them blankets the forest floor in places, soft and damp rather than crunchy. You follow your familiar path through them. You once scratched X’s on the tree trunks at odd intervals with your athame, but it’s been a while since you needed their guidance to get where you want to go.

About two miles due southeast of the forest’s edge, through a bramble thicket, down in the hollow beneath the slope, there’s a little creek on whose banks a variety of flowers flourish. There wasn’t anything special about it when you first found it, but you picked up some seeds from town on a whim, and now you have your own private little garden. You have a collection of roses, marigolds, catmint, lavender, and daisies, among others. The life and color of them is always a refreshing contrast to the Temple’s barren surroundings in your mind.

You’ve been cooped up for so long that you feared your plants would have wilted away or been killed off by a sudden cold snap, but thankfully it’s not so severe. They look a little droopy, but after some care, they’ll be ship shape again. Gardening really doesn’t take that much work, as far as you’ve seen. The flowers seem to perk up at your very touch, though no one would believe you if you told them that. Mostly, you just bring them a little extra water from the creek and keep any weeds from encroaching on their territory. You hum to them, too, a murmured song of encouragement that you’ve always known, though you don’t remember where from.

Sometimes you think you do it for your sake as much as for the plants’. The melody stirs some inexplicable thing in your soul, a kind of melancholy and peace that flow together and fill a missing piece of you whose absence you don’t notice until you search for it. It’s peculiar, to say the least, but there’s no one around to scold you, so you hum as much as you want. In some memory of shadowy golden light, someone else teaches you the song in a voice sweet as springtime, but you never see their face.

You figure it must be your mother. Whoever she was, she abandoned you on the steps of the Temple of Death when you were less than a year old, a common enough fate for orphans and other unwanted children. Honestly you would have preferred she left you to the wolves out here in the wilderness. Maybe they would have raised you as one of their own, and you would have grown up somewhere you felt like you belonged.

Even now, the woods remain your one place of safety, hallowed ground where the monks will not trespass. Your few worldly possessions are hidden here, alongside the flowers, since they’re not allowed at the Temple. Buried beneath the roots of a sturdy oak tree, the rectangular case contains your ashwood bow, a quiver full of arrows, and a small white fragment.

Sometimes you go hunting, more for the excitement of it than anything, but you don’t let the meat go to waste like the animal sacrifices do. The local butcher is always happy to take it off your hands and offers you silver for it. Ironically, the monks are staunch vegetarians, and you’re not, so you prefer payment in the form of smoked jerky on the rare occasions you can get it. Today would be perfect, but you don’t feel the urge to do more than run your hands over the bow’s smooth wooden limbs and flick the string gently a couple of times.

More to your interest is the artifact you’ve kept with you all your life, the only other thing that ties your memory to your mother’s faceless voice. Before you found this place, you kept it in the pockets of your robes, or in your child-sized fist, fiercely protective of it. Back then it had a softer texture, like a flower petal, but over the years it hardened to the consistency of bone. You’ve always thought of it as the shape of a wing, a rounded piece with feather-like protrusions sweeping out from one side. You don’t have a clue what it might be, but it’s yours — not a thing given to you, like your ceremonial athame or your hunting bow, but a birthright.

Tracing your thumb over the grainy surface, you’re so lost in thought that you fail to hear the footsteps coming up on you from behind the tree until it’s too late. Something sharp pricks your neck, and you start to feel woozy immediately. Vaguely, you’re aware of vines wrapping around your feet, your torso, as if to secure you, but that can’t be real. It’s all almost like a dream, but instead of drawing closer to wakefulness, you’re swallowed slowly into a sea of black.

__ ___ __

You wake groggily as the poison starts to usher itself out of your system. Apparently sooner than expected, because when you open your bleary eyes you’re met with a rare look of surprise on Father English’s stony face. He doesn’t speak, and when you try to, you can’t for the cloth gag pushing down on your tongue, tied around the back of your head. You squint hard at him, hoping the daggers of your glare might be sharp enough to menace him into telling you what’s going on. No such luck.

You make the effort to raise yourself up, your shoulders digging uselessly into the hard stone slab beneath you and your neck straining, unsupported. Your hands are tied behind your back, your legs similarly bound together at the knees and ankles, making struggle nearly impossible.

And you are increasingly beginning to worry you might need to struggle.

Father English steps away briefly to collect something from another elder, and you twist to get a good look at your surroundings. You have an elevated vantage point at the center of a courtyard. It takes you a moment to recognize it, because every other time you’ve seen it, you’ve been part of the circle of monks and acolytes sitting around the outer edges. You always averted your eyes when the elder drew the knife across the neck of the sacrificial animal and let blood spill onto stone.

Even then, there was no avoiding the sight of red pooling beneath the altar. There was no getting out of the part of the ritual where you went forward in a single-file line to kneel in the blood to pray, purposefully staining the white ceremonial robes you wore for the occasion.

And now you’re the one on the altar. You feel sick, not just from the rush of dizziness when you drop your head back down again. Father English looms over you and removes an bone-handled athame from a sheathe in his wide sleeve. He waits for the torches all around the altar to be lit, and begins to chant.

You’ve always known there was something more insidious to the rare sacrifices you were not invited to observe, that acolytes who disappeared at random hadn’t actually been sent away to another temple. You’ve seen the new, unmarked grave sites in the cemetery that seemed to manifest overnight. You just never wanted to believe it for what it was.

For the first time in a long time, you pray, genuinely pray, not just for yourself but for the others whose needless deaths you completely ignored for the sake of your own comfort. You ask for—for what, mercy? A miracle? Your soul’s safe passage to the Elysian fields?

Absurdly, you wonder what the Prince of Heart’s real name is. Apparently even in the face of impending death by ritual sacrifice, anything will distract you from prayer. Of the countless hours you spent in forced supplication before his imposing statue, most were passed in daydreams, sometimes even ones in which he came to life before your eyes, radiant and muscular and… Well, boredom can lead a man to imagine a great many things, in your defense. After a couple of those instances, you were fairly assured the Prince didn’t listen in on your “prayers,” if he listened to anyone’s at all.

Your faith in the gods isn’t the strongest, obviously, but you find yourself hoping the Prince does exist, if only so you might get a chance to appeal your injust and untimely death. There were stories you believed in as a child, though, of the names and the tales of the gods.

The echo in your memory is almost like the female voice you’ve always thought to be your mother, accompanied by that same feeling of warmth and safety in a hidden place. That doesn’t make any sense, though. You wouldn’t have been old enough to actually comprehend anything she might have said to you, yet you remember the words so clearly.

There was the Witch of the Wild, a goddess said to have made space for all the forests in the world, who shared her true name with a gem as green as her eyes, eyes like yours in some way. The Prince of Heart, the death god who ruled over the Underworld, had been named for a dagger, she told you, and whispered it like it was dangerous.

_Dirk._

The air temperature plummets. Father English’s athame has barely grazed your neck when gasps and outcries disturb his focus, and in his pause he lifts the blade. The panic racing in your veins grows sluggish as you realize you’re not dead yet. Father English turns with a glaring fury towards the other monks, but his face changes in an instant to something mollified, even reverent.

A voice speaks in a quiet rasp, as if it hasn’t been put to use for some time, yet it echoes across the courtyard with a chilling strength that makes the hairs on your arms stand on end.

“What is this?”

Father English bows low, and over his back you catch a glimpse of the newcomer who disrupted the ceremony. Without your glasses, it’s hard to distinguish his features from this far away, but you make out the vague shape of him, and the colors. He’s garbed all in purple, his skin paler than parchment. His hair is so fair it verges on platinum, so that his dark, arched horns stand out starkly behind the tall, spiked tiara that adorns his head.

Maybe you are already dead after all, or if not, you will be soon. There’s no way the Prince of Heart is here, in the flesh, to spare your life. He doesn’t do that sort of thing, not in any of the oral or written accounts you’ve been forced to memorize.

None of the accounts mention anyone being able to summon him by name, either.

“My lord,” Father English intones as he straightens up, his arms spread in a grand, solemn gesture. “Behold our offering to you, a penitent soul, his sins to be washed away with the letting of his blood in your honor.”

The cold steel of the athame finds its target against your artery and your pulse kicks up in a staccato of terror once more. You twist as much as you can to avoid the blade, but futility sinks into your bones. It ends now, with everything in your life left undone and your questions unanswered. You make one last plea in numb, desperate hope that you can’t put words to in your mind, nothing more than _Dirk, Dirk, Dirk_ , even though you have no reason to expect that he might take pity on you.

“Stop.”

A flicker of uncertainty creates a furrow in Father English’s brow, but he overcomes it with a shake of his head. A crazed kind of determination burns in his eyes as they bore into you. He adjusts his grip on the dagger. “This is your will, my lord. I cannot defy it.”

It happens in the blink of an eye. The Prince of Heart melts into shadow and reappears directly behind Father English with a bright magenta energy crackling in his palm. Father English lets out a wrenching scream and topples forwards, leaving an faint after-image of himself flickering in the air until the Prince snaps his hand shut.

“I decide my own will.”

You stare first at the body half-fallen across your legs, then at the Prince’s angular, gloriously vengeful face. Dirk’s face. Up close, you can see his eagle-like eyes, sharply observant and piercing amber that ranges close to orange in color.

He bends to retrieve the athame and shoves the corpse off of you, and for a moment you fear he might be ready to finish the job himself. Instead, he cuts through your bindings, first for your legs and then for your arms. You lay on the altar, as stupefied into silence as all the monks attending the ritual. When you finally try to speak, it’s muffled and unintelligible, and you realize you forgot about your gag. Dirk reaches for it at the same time, but draws back, allowing you to do the honors. His eyes search yours intensely as you sit up, slowly and warily, to face him.

Glancing down, you find Father English’s body rapidly blackening like a bruised fruit at Dirk’s feet. His skin seems to harden and then crack, flaking away into ash, until there is nothing left of him but a pile of soot. You’re suddenly glad that Dirk didn’t lay a hand on you in the process of freeing you. Your horror must creep into your expression, because Dirk looks away from you uncomfortably.

“It isn’t safe for you here. Come with me.”

Despite what you just witnessed, the fear crawling beneath your skin, you nod mutely. Who are you to refuse the request of a god?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feel free to leave comments, they keep me goin on this bitch of an earth!


End file.
